Why are shopping carts always broken? | Hacker News Reader

Why are shopping carts always broken?

cnn.com

76 pointssys_64738263 comments

At a Winco there was a box fan full of tools and parts parked at the end of the parking lot with a hundred or so carts in front of it. It was a repairman going through every cart, took several days as he made his way through all the carts at the store. Had never seen that before.

Reminds me of summers spent working for the school district, replacing the glides on the feet of the metal tubed classroom chairs so the broken ones wouldn’t wobble or tear up the linoleum tiles. https://www.allglides.com/metalbase.html

All part of the hidden world of keeping shit working I guess

I know a business that fix shopping carts. They don't repair at the store, they load up the broken ones onto a truck and take it to the repair shop. The repair shop is a part of large industrial parts store. It's very expensive for the shopping store to repair because it's typically a repair man who has some welding skills that fixes these things. Not sure why other people in this thread would think there is a specific person at each store who is going to fix these things.

You described a more professional version of what Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys does to earn his money.

The fan thing also fooled me, but I came here expecting the story to be about web shopping carts. In recent year's I've been prevented from ordering something by a broken web site far more than I've been frustrated by physical shopping cart. The real thing is far more reliable in my experience, and finding another physical cart is so much easier than invoking the web debugger to get past a broken site.

The real story was well worth the read, but I only read it once I twigged what the fan had to do with the story.

I was trying to figure out what the box fan filled with parts was going to be for. Took way too long. Not enough caffeine yet today.

I reread it 3 times and still left a typo in there, guess it’s good I didn’t become an editor :facepalm:

This kinda sounds like out of touch big city reporting or something…

I’ve experienced broken carts, but not often enough to say “man, those things are always broken”

The article picture is from the Costco in Wheaton, Maryland. That particular Costco is built into a shopping mall, Westfield Wheaton Mall, which is in the process of being sold. The Costco was the main business keeping the place alive. This part of Maryland is between Baltimore and DC, and for whatever reason, everything in between is kind of run down in general. There seems to be a cultural apathy around here that results in social malaise, like shopping carts not being cared for, etc.

this is an ad. of sorts. you are to be upset at grocers, for not paying for high quality wheels. (go on now, get upset at the right people. this was expensive, relatively.)

cnn is news entertainment.

> While the rubber wheels cost twice the price of the standard polyurethane ones, Diaz said P&H Casters’ natural rubber wheels can last for about a decade, barring mistreatment from customers. In a busier store environment, they can hold out between four and five years.

> However, many retailers choose cheaper parts because the upfront price is typically higher for more durable material, Poulos added.

It's not entirely fair for the author to draw conclusion on this particular topic, especially ones as provoking as "cost cutting".

Shopping trolleys are one of those topics where the more you look, the more you find: especially when it comes to the wheels.

For example despite the article mentioning rubber as being superior to PU - it's not always suitable, or even safe. Such as for malls which use ramp-style escalators which allow a shopping trolley to be moved between floors. These must employ PU wheels which have grooves that match the escalator. This lowers the shopping trolley sufficiently for a rubber-brake to press against the ramp, preventing the trolley from moving.

An example of the grooved PU wheel and rubber-brake can be seen here: https://www.industrial-casterwheels.com/china-escalator_trol...

>> While the rubber wheels cost twice the price of the standard polyurethane ones

Which seems insane because if you buy replacement suspension parts for cars, the long lasting polyurethane replacements always cost more than the OEM style rubber ones.

I'm more pissed that supermarkets removed baskets so you HAVE to push around a behemoth that squeals and drags to the right

Where have supermarkets phased out baskets? All the ones near me (midwest) still have them, even walmart

Shopping carts are always broken because the store doesn't give damn. For instance in my current city giant Auchan store has literally every single cart busted, unmaintained and completely rusted top to bottom. Similarly sized Carrefour has normal carts, mostly without any issues, just like Ikea and several other medium and small stores. Kaufland even has some fancy new carts, which not only work fine but have some modern ergo handles. It's just some Auchan middle manager has decided that they aren't interested in the carts and that was the result. And adding more insult to the injury - those Auchan carts have fully indoor use, because parking is inside same building, and Carrefour and Ikea have open parking lots with carts experiencing weather and rough pavement.

We can try to blame weather, people, stack problem, ethics, cart design, economic downturns or taxes, but that's all a misdirection. The blame lies squarely on some middle manager who either enforces maintaining and replacement of the carts or he doesn't.

You can blame one middle manager.

You can't blame a million middle managers. If all middle managers are doing something wrong, that's a problem of org design.

The same is true across the board. One corrupt congressman? Bad apple. 100 of them in a government? Something is wrong with the way the system is set up. One bad teacher? Bad apple. Most teachers are bad? You're looking at some issue with hiring practices, training, salary, incentives, management, accountability, transparency, administration, or something else.

These problems get hard to solve when blame is misplaced. You can't fix an org structure if you can't talk about teachers doing bad things since people confound that with bad teachers. The exact same person can be the most and the least competent based on the situation they're in.

the original saying about bad apples is that one spoils the barrel, which applies in some organizational cases.

Sure you can't blame a million middle managers, because they are all in different barrels, but congress people are in the same barrel, and if one is corrupt we might assume that non-corrupt ones will be corrupted over time by exposure.

Many systems can be set up to ease spoiling, thus creating a two-tiered problem, when the teachers are all bad because the system promotes bad teachers you can't fix it just by fixing the system because you have a crop of teachers in their barrels waiting to rot any newcomer and also rising to positions where they can put regulations in place to ease rottenness in the future.

I think we're talking about a difference in timescales. My experience is that culture naturally converges to incentives, but very slowly.

If we were to evaluate teachers in ways which didn't align to tests (or not at all), put in mechanisms to fire bad teachers, added transparency and accountability (so parents know what's going wrong and can try to advocate to fix it), etc. we would have a whole new teaching culture... circa 2044.

A faster reboot is possible, but with more disruption (e.g. wholesale firing). Disruption is harmful in several ways, from impacting morale and stability (making it more difficult to bring in qualified people), to having experienced people leave, to simply taking time to learn how to work in the new order. Whether a disruption is warranted depends on the level of organizational dysfunction.

The current set of dysfunctions in schools specifically are grounded in a narrow tests which were implemented in 2002. Schools have increasingly broken, as anything not in Common Core was increasingly ignored, and schools competed on the only measure they were evaluated on.

Of course in the human society there are no things that are simple single step problems. There is a problem and someone/something was causing it directly, but that cause usually had a cause of its own, and again and again, in a chain, branching indefinitely. So yeah, the cause of that manager making bad decision is his bad education and bad hiring decision by an upper tier, and the cause of his bad education was a bad teacher or mentor, and the cause of that was a bad education and bad hiring of the upper tier, and so on and so on. Indefinitely.

All it takes is inventories of carts periodically done, and you’ve created the incentive to never take a cart out of service, because now there is paperwork involved.

If instead you can order a few new carts “when you feel low” there’s nothing preventing someone at the store putting the annoying dead cart into the dumpster.

Never underestimate the friction paperwork causes.

When almost everything is broken the organizational problem is in society.

Capitalism and democracy are the worst forms of economic and political management, except for all the others we've tried.

(Footnote: I still think there may be better ones out there worth trying. But I much prefer this to warlords roving the land, or being a serf in a fiefdom)

Yeah, the issue is capitalism. It requires costs be minimized and profits go up. Why buy quality carts? Why pay employees good wages? Simple: you don't because every other business is doing the same thing.

Real answer: customers don’t give an damn and break and steal them.

This article misses a very big reason. It's a scheduling type problem. They rarely have good systems in place to deal with taking bad trollies out of service, so they stay in service and sit at the front of the stack, because some people notice and reject the trolley but they generally find their way back onto the stack. If you always take the first trolley of the stack and regularly find it is busted it is probably because you are often taking other people's rejected trollies

At my local there's often a few columns of trolleys next to each other. I always go for the column with the fewest trolleys as I assume that the trolley sitting at the head of the longest column is likely to have an issue.

I do the same, but for a different reason. In my mind, they are less accessible, as the end of the line usually has metal guardrails, thus leaving the closer and easier-to-reach carts for other people.

On the other hand, in my area, I have never seen a broken cart, perhaps because they require coins to operate.

In my area they also require coins, yet they're often busted in some way.

I think the root of the issue is the people who use them, coins or not.

I'm enjoying learning about shopping cart / trolley-based game theory. Haha

It depends on how they’re loaded into the queue - some are back loaded “fifo” from an employee door, others are “lifo” from the customer side.

FIFO is more likely to keep pushing the bad one to the front, whereas lifo will eventually have the far carts be the bad ones.

But I’ve rarely if ever had a bad cart so maybe this is an issue somewhere else. It is amazing to realize that at about $200-400 a pop, the average Walmart has something like a quarter million dollars worth of carts.

Not Costco's - have been to many over the years and they have some of the best maintained, good quality carts you don't mind dragging across their gigantic parking lot.

Also Publix tends to have pretty nicely maintained shopping carts. Part of the reason might be that they provide complimentary cart service where someone will push the cart out to your car and help load the groceries.

Ah yes forgot about Publix - and yeah more than once I have been asked by Publix employees if I needed help pushing the cart - they seemed to be happy to do it too!

Publix is the best. My wife's family used to work for them and the benefits were great.

Free college tuition for one. Defined retirement. Very decent health care (better than a well known Southern multinational you've heard about corporate care)

It's all gone now, I believe, now that the family list control of it (but I thought the employees owned half of it :S ?)

When I worked there as a bagger many years ago, it was expected. If the customer said no, we were to insist. Even then, we'd get looks from management if we let too many buggies leave the store without us. Also, we'd get in serious trouble if we accepted a tip.

Also Ikea. It’s weird how quiet and easy they are to push.

Their carts' stack is FIFO, not LIFO so they get worn evenly.

I bet the long path through every department IKEA nudges you to take forces their hand a bit compared to, say, a grocery store.

My understanding is that most carts aren't broken but something is stuck in the bearings/bushings that allow the wheels to rotate on both axis. Just desmantling the wheel once in a while, cleaning it and regreasing it would do the trick.

It is just that shops do not care nor are willing to pay someone to spend the 15 to 30 minutes[1] every day to it takes check and fix them.

[1] if they were checked daily, most of them would stay in shape so a very little amount of them would need a fix per day.

> something stuck in the bearings/bushings

This is tracks with my experience. I used to work for a mid-sized US grocery chain in the Midwest (Farmer Jack if anyone remembers those, gone now) and I once got reprimanded for cleaning the cart wheels. I didn't even have to take the wheels apart most of the time, just get in there with some WD-40 or pop out the small bits of concrete or rock with a screwdriver. Apparently that was a waste of time in my manager's eyes since "the carts were always broken anyway" and I was supposed to be unloading stock.

I'd classify that as "broken, but easily repairable". Maybe I'm a spoiled desk jockey, but if I'm "dismantling" anything that size and weight, I ain't just cleaning it.

I wouldn't call a bicycle that has a draggy old bottom bracket or wheel hub as broken.

In need of service yes.

> Grocery store carts are more likely to have carts with wonky wheels than ... drugstores

Do countries other than the US have shopping carts in their "drug stores"?

For those outside of the US looking to answer, here is some context from the US. “Drug stores” in the US double as convenience stores. There is a pharmacy in the back along with over the counter medications, but they also sell cosmetics, basic prepackaged food, toys, alcohol, magazines, greeting cards, and other such things. It’s not like Americans are buying carts full of drugs. I also think drug stores generally have the small baskets, not the large carts one might find at a grocery store.

Really it's the opposite. It's called a pharmacy, but in practice it is a convenience store first, and a pharmacy second. Often times the pharmacy is closed, has restricted hours, is understaffed, etc.

Not really. Walgreens and CVS are basically this, and many of them have 24 hour pharmacies.

Where in the US do you live that you have easy access to a 24 hour pharmacy?

In my corner of the USA the only 24 hour pharmacy is in the children's hospital, about 15 miles away from my house.

I have three hospitals with ERs within 5 miles but no pharmacy.

Walgreens has quite a few around here. It’s something they advertise.

They were much more common before Covid, when places like Walmart were 24 hours.

Any major metropolitan area. Walgreens has dozens of 24 hour pharmacies in the Chicago metro area: https://www.walgreens.com/storelocator/find.jsp?24-hour-phar...

Today I learned another reason that despite appearances Baltimore is not a "major metropolitan area". I'm not being sarcastic, it really doesn't have the economy of one.

But I also wonder if it's just the very largest cities that have easy 24 hour pharmacy access.

> But I also wonder if it's just the very largest cities that have easy 24 hour pharmacy access.

I live near a city with population of about 50k. It has a 24 hour Walgreens.

Wow! I live in a city which is fifteen times larger, and there is no Walgreens open later than 10 PM (nor Rite Aid, nor Bartell); the pharmacies generally close by 8. I wonder why some places get better service than we do?

I live in suburban Detroit, and there's a few 24 hour CVS and Walgreen's near me.

There's both a Walgreens and a CVS near me, and both of their pharmacies close at 6pm. The nearest 24hour pharmacy is not quite two hours away.

I would describe German drug stores in the same way (except that they don't contain a pharmacy and can't sell over the counter drugs). Smaller drug stores in big cities have a few small carts if any but often it's just baskets that you carry. Larger ones usually have carts. I don't think it's odd for them to have carts though, drug stores sell a lot of cleaning stuff which can be heavy and toilet paper which can fill up a cart pretty quick.

> I would describe German drug stores in the same way (except that they don't contain a pharmacy and can't sell over the counter drugs)

So, in the USA they are called "drug stores" because they sell... drugs. Prescription and over the counter. Are these really called drug stores, or using the German word for drugs, even though they don't sell them... because of their overlap with the non-drug business that the American ones have come to donate more square feet (and prob more revenue) to? Or for other reasons unrelated to USA practice?

They are called "Drogerie" or "Drogeriemarkt" which could be quite translated to drug store. Just like in the other comment about the Netherlands, a pharmacy is called "Apotheke" in Germany and only they are allowed to sell prescription drugs and most over-the-counter drugs. You can't get Aspirin or Ibuprofen in a Drogeriemarkt here. I think traditionally the line was more blurred between pharmacies and drug stores but regulations changed that and our drug stores became some kind of specialized (mainly non-food) supermarkets.

I'm actually not sure if the definition of over-the-counter drugs can be applied in the same way in Germany. We have prescription drugs and non-prescription drugs. Non-prescription drugs are still limited to be sold by pharmacies only by default, for example Ibuprofen (but only in small quantities). Some selected categories of less potent drugs or pharmaceutical products can be sold by any store (and even then only if they can prove they employ someone with sufficient expertise).

Don't know how they are called in Germany but I guess it's similar as in the Netherlands: These "non drug" stores are called a "drogisterij" (and the English translation will be 'drugstore'), which is from a "chemist's shop" which in the past used to sell all kinds of stuff including medicine. These days the real drugstores are now solely called "apotheken" (pharmacies), I guess to distinguish them from each other.

There is some overlap with the two as the pharmacies also sell OTC drugs. edit: The pharmacy where I used to live as a kid was more of a drug store in the US sense with a pharmacy in the back, which also acts as the cashier, and the rest of the store was filled with all kinds of household products like beauty and cleaning.

> alcohol

Please tell me it's not the drinking kind?

Like they said, it doubles as a convenience store. In the states where convenience stores can sell alcohol (most of them), yes.

Yes, but at least at CVS they no longer sell cigarettes https://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/05/health/cvs-cigarettes/ind...

It’s changed now, I’m sure, but growing up in Indiana there were two places to buy hard liquor: liquor store, and the drug store. And the drug store was often cheaper.

I’ve always wondered what convoluted logic lead to passing such a law in 1889, or whenever they thought it was a good idea.

Where I am (Ohio, USA), drug stores like CVS/Wallgreens sell beer, wine.

Hard liquor over a certain alcohol percent is only available at a state liquor agency.

And cigarettes in Nevada

In Washington state, drug stores dedicate as much or more space to booze, including high proof liquors, as they do to medical goods.

It is a *drug* store.

Why not?

In many parts of world, it would be seen ironic. Like a gym selling junk food.

Like protein bars?

In Germany you have something close to „drug stores in the US“ but minus the pharmacy. For example: dm, Müller, Rossmann. The bigger ones (especially dm) actually always have shopping carts. It‘s very common for people to buy large things in these stores, like toilet paper, baby diapers etc. which can easily fill a shopping cart.

Yup, actually dm is short for "Drogeriemarkt", which could be translated as "drug market". And yes, due to legislation in Germany, they can only sell things like vitamin supplements, "real" drugs (even non-prescription ones) can only be sold in pharmacies.

> "Drogeriemarkt", which could be translated as "drug market".

One has to distinguish between "[die] Drogerie" (more explizit term: "[das] Drogeriefachgeschäft") und "[der] Drogeriemarkt" (in particular in Austria and Switzerland this is strongly distinguished).

Drogerien are specialized shops with well-trained salespeople (Drogist: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drogist). Drogeriemärkte, on the other hand, are convenience stores that sell cleaning agents, cosmetics, nutritional supplements, ... Because in the latter, prizes are typically much cheaper, they replaced Drogerien in many cases.

My grandfather was a "Drogist" and his job was not to sell drugs, but anything pharmacy/chemistry related: "I got that oily dirt on my jacket" - "Say no more, I mix you the perfect soap for this". That feels quite the same as dm/Rossmann/.. from a customer point of view.

The modern word Droge/drug does not mean what it used to mean.

Seem like that's common in continental Europe.

In Spain in a "droguería" you would find something quite similar to a DM: cleaning supplies, some chemicals, personal hygiene and cosmetic products and the like. A "drogaria" in Portugal probably would a bit more similar like a hardware store, but also in the theme...

> Seem like that's common in continental Europe.

Yeah, it's a very historical thing dating back from times of Marco Polo, the Silk Road, and the likes.

In France we have "pharmacie", "droguerie", "épicerie", and "quincaillerie".

- "pharmacie" is the regulated medical thing, historically it was "apothicaire" (apothecary)

- "quincaillerie" is where you get hardware ("quincaille") like screws, tubes, metal parts, and whatnot, and by extension, tools. By extension "quincaille" coloquially refers to small, cheap stuff in a derogatory way (akin to "lemon" but for small things).

- "droguerie" is where you get various general usage, non-medical stuff, from hygiene to ; it is part of "épicerie", where it used to be "all manners of drugs sold under the merchand guild, from dye pigments to perfume, hygiene products and cosmetics, as well as medicine". In the XVIII century the "drugs" term largely meant "things of small value that you can put on the market" and "mixes for which only artists and craftsmen hold the secret".

With this definition you can see how it grew from "épicerie" (=> "spicery", a shop for spice) from the economy market of bringing such goods from specific countries like North Africa, Middle East, India, China and whatnot. Pigments, spice, and medicine were obtained from foreign sources and highly sought after. Of course this could involve a deal of mysticism and exotic mystery, a perfect recipe for snake-oil medicine and once medical goods began to be regulated it is left with "alternative" medicinal things.

- "épicerie" used to cover all of the above, but today it's your corner-shop that has a bit of everything and is open most of the time to 24/7 (bordering on the illegal, or outright skirting opening hour laws) and saves you in a pinch. These businesses are often held by people of above areas ascendance, not really surprising given the history of it.

That would be more or less the same than in Spanish:

- "Farmacia" for the regulated drugs

- "Quincalla" is cheap hardware that you could find on a flea market or maybe a corner-shop. Old terms for places that would sell that kind of stuff would be "quincallería" or "chamarilería", but today you would probably go to a "bazar".

- And, as I anticipated, the "opens till late and has a bit of everything" store would be a "bazar", although sometimes is referred using the nationality or origin of the managers (usually from South Asia or China, at least on Spain)

There's also "parapharmacie" which sell things like lotions, shampoo, and other hygiene and beauty supplies. (Though not necessarily medicines, although some (most?) will also have that capacity.)

Even old American writings talk of “the chemist” which is clearly an early pharmacist who has various chemicals he can mix to make medicines or house cleaning supplies.

Interesting, I never made the connection. In my language "drogéria" is a store like dm - place to get cosmetics, perfumes, cleaning supplies and other similar chemicals. No relation to pharmacies ("lekáreň" => "liek" = drug).

For people from Europe not familiar with the big drug stores the parent is referring to: these drug stores are more like a Rossman with a pharmacy counter in the back.

Not familiar with Rossman but with german DM (drogerie markt) & Muller being well represented in my country (and I presumed other ones in Europe) for over a decade or more, I thought this concept had already been established in all of Europe.

In the US, a drug store is a DM with a pharmacy in the back. There are way fewer independent pharmacies in the US nowadays as 'drug stores' have taken over.

Things are getting more interfused all the time, like there is this store 'farmacia' where I live, looks like a pharmacy, sells pills, but you can't pick up prescriptions because it's not a real pharmacy. Then the national postal offices sell gadgets and trinkets, likely because sending actual mail is in decline, and package delivery is better served by private delivery services. Gas stations have even started selling bread because of a new law that prevents grocery stores and malls from working on most Sundays.

We had a small chain in Seattle that was an oldschool holistic health store but also had a modern pharmacy attached. The one location nearest our home unfortunately did not have the pharmacy because the owner of the building also leased out to CVS across the street and the lease precluded a pharmacy from being in that location. I feel depressed going into CVS so in the end just moved my prescriptions to mail-order which is easiest (and probably most reliable) anyway.

Around here gas stations sell bread and other basic grocery things because it gets people into the store.

Our local gas station stores are bigger than the first supermarkets, probably. Multiple aisles and fresh produce, etc.

Part of the reason independent pharmacies have declined is due to pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). For example, Aetna owns CVS and they force you to go there.

I've certainly been to big Boots stores in the UK with small trolleys - the ones that are like a basket on wheels at waist height

Australian ones have a retail section with band-aids, non-prescription medicine, vitamins, nappies, sunscreen, skincare, hair care and "natural medicines" most of which are borderline frauds.

Maybe no trollies though.

Germany was mentioned, South Africa is another country that has drug stores, including the Pharmacy, e.g. Clicks.

I live in the US and haven’t ever seen a shopping cart in a drug store… maybe that’s why they stay so nice :)

In Chicago, shopping carts used to be commonly found in Osco Drugs, mostly because they were attached to Jewel Food stores. A few Dominick's groceries had Walgreens drugstores attached, but there weren't many of those.

They exist, but they're smaller than supermarket shopping carts.

Yea. Look up DM

Not sure why I'm being down voted for this but dm is definitely eu drug store with carts :D

"DM" is the store name? Do they have a website?

I was thinking you might have been meaning Denmark or something, as it wasn't clear. :)

Didn't down vote you though.

Yes, yes, dm.de

Thanks for the comment :)

Do people in other countries buy paracetamol and aspirin in 10L bottles so they wouldn't need to run their F4999 trucks to a drugstore every week?

Most countries have laws limiting the size of paracetamol & aspirin bottles to reduce overdoses & suicides.

The UK passed a law in 1998 about it and saw suicides from overdoses drop 21% and liver transplants from paracetamol poisoning drop 66%.

"Numbers of tablets per pack of paracetamol and salicylates decreased markedly in the year after the change in legislation on 16 September 1998. The annual number of deaths from paracetamol poisoning decreased by 21% (95% confidence interval 5% to 34%) and the number from salicylates decreased by 48% (11% to 70%). Liver transplant rates after paracetamol poisoning decreased by 66% (55% to 74%). The rate of non-fatal self poisoning with paracetamol in any form decreased by 11% (5% to 16%), mainly because of a 15% (8% to 21%) reduction in overdoses of paracetamol in non-compound form."

Many countries have laws limiting the size of vehicles and weight for non-commercial licenses too :)

What are the limits? (Asked as a US guy who buys the 500 x 500mg bottles at BJ's.)

Painkillers are sold in packs of max 16 tablets in the UK (almost always 500mg for paracetamol, 200mg for ibuprofen). In addition they must be sold in blister packs not bottles, and all shops will only allow you to buy two packets per transaction (mix and match, you can’t have 2x paracetamol and 2x ibuprofen). I believe there are some exceptions for prescriptions.

Obviously you can still overdose by going to multiple stores and popping them all out of the blister packs but it puts enough of a barrier in that you have to be more determined (and more knowledgeable about what amount will actually kill you). Apparently it works.

> I believe there are some exceptions for prescriptions.

You can essentially forget the maximum pill numbers for paracetamol/ibuprofen when it comes to prescriptions in the UK. Doctors can prescribe hundreds of either pill to be given to a patient at once (eg if someone is prescribed to take 8 a day and they get their meds monthly, as is the case with one paracetamol recipient I know, the pharmacy gives him multiple 100x 500mg paracetamol boxes each month.)

(To be clear, "given to them at once" as in dispensing the pills, not giving to take all at once!)

> all shops will only allow you to buy two packets per transaction

They do that indeed, though I am not sure wthere it is the law of their own "do-gooder" policies. I don't think it is the law because it happened to me a few times to just pull a sad face and have the employee at the till just go "fine, but just this time".

This is slightly ridiculous, IMHO: You can buy more if you want, just split transactions. And of course no-one stops you from buying a trolley-full of vodka and bleach.

>This is slightly ridiculous, IMHO: You can buy more if you want, just split transactions. And of course no-one stops you from buying a trolley-full of vodka and bleach.

You can split transactions, but committing suicide takes effort, and a relatively significant rate of suicides are impulsive. For impulsive suicide, having a barrier or interruption can prevent the attempt. Something as small as a phone call interrupting you as you get the pills out could be sufficient to move past a particular impulse.

There is also a huge difference in suicide attempt method depending on gender. Women tend to gravitate towards pills, while men are more likely to use a gun.

The impulse has to be to eat the tablets or whatever's on hand. Going all the way to the shop to stock up on tablets does not strike me as impulsive.

So IMHO this restriction is an attempt at limiting the stock people have at home. Although I would argue this is none of the shop's business and, as far as I can gather, this is not a legal restriction.

> So IMHO this restriction is an attempt at limiting the stock people have at home

Correct. But this isn't a bad thing - it means people are less likely to have a large supply of dangerous pills at hand if they get a sudden urge to kill themselves or attempt a cry for help during a depressive episode.

> Although I would argue this is none of the shop's business

In practical terms it appears that this actually does reduce suicides and poisonings; it's a significant reduction in suffering in the world.

The cost is a very small and temporary limitation on personal convenience. It's surely worth it. See also seatbelt laws.

> and, as far as I can gather, this is not a legal restriction.

It is in some countries, but the legal obligation is on the vendor, not the individual. If you are confident that you do need a larger cache of tablets then you can do that yourself with only minimal extra inconvenience.

I think it's an elegant solution. Suicides are reduced, but the state doesn't overrule individual decision making on what their needs are.

It is a legal restriction and it has saved hundreds of lives.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK374099/

The pack size is a legal restriction, not the number of packs you can buy in one transaction as long as the total number of tablets does not exceed 100 (i.e. legal restriction is in effect 6 packs in one transaction), from what I understand, while the 2-pack restriction is a "voluntary best practice".

Those 'voluntary' limitations, and there are others, are a bit of a pet peeve of mine because they strike me as hypocrisy/posturing/paternalism.

I think the main thing is the blister pack requirement, you can't just unscrew the lid and down a bottle.

Limiting to two... I don't know, it has occasionally annoyed me (when I think I want to 'stock up') but I suppose there's just no reason you actually need more than that at once (other than self-harm or with a prescription) so meh why not if it has a small chance at stopping a few suicide attempts.

What criteria do you use to evaluate that intervention? Which really means, how do you begin to estimate the actual amount of harm reduction that it provides?

Are there lots of cases where someone tried to overdose but was saved by it 'only' being 16 grams of paracetamol?

The number of deaths due to paracetamol poisoning fell by 22% in the year after the legislation. There was no significant increase in suicide deaths by other means. We see similar results with interventions like reducing the availability of highly toxic pesticides or installing barriers on bridges.

Most suicidality is impulsive and transient, so simple interventions to reduce access to means of suicide can have very significant results. There's very little you can do to prevent a sufficiently determined person from dying by suicide, but most people who die by suicide aren't strongly motivated to die - they're just briefly overwhelmed by life.

https://www.bmj.com/content/329/7474/1076

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/saves...

I'm on an alt account here for obvious reasons.

I can only speak from my experience, but at one point I took all the paracetamol I had (suicidal and pretty drunk, the taste of cheap red wine and paracetamol is... unpleasant to say the least). I ended up fine after a friend forced me to go to the hospital the next day. If I had more tablets around, I would have taken them too. So it likely wouldn't stop someone who planned to kill themselves, however with me anyway not having like 100 tablets around did help due to it being impulsive enough.

It might have been quite a big difference due to how long after the fact I went to the hospital, I took quite a lot but it had done little enough damage that some medicine in my arm over the course of about a day and having to avoid alcohol and paracetamol for a while was enough to fix it.

I imagine a lot of cases are quite similar to mine and it probably did make quite a big difference with me as I only had 2 boxes around and one wasn't completely full.

The grandparent of the post you're responding to provides stats showing that suicides/overdoses with OTC painkillers went down markedly after the change.

What do you do with them? I'd guess the total lifetime consumption of any medicine for me and my family is less than 500 pills, a pack of 20 can last more than a year because it's not that often that any of it is needed, and when something happens, you take them for a couple of days and that's it. Do many people in USA pop painkillers or paracetamol or aspirin daily?

*ding ding ding*

Your nose is running? Pop some NyQuil. Hangover? NyQuil. Headache from the cold? NyQuil. Cold? NyQuil.

Just look at the list of symptoms it helps with at their site: https://vicks.com/en-us/shop-products/nyquil

https://tedium.co/2021/11/03/nyquil-cold-medicine-history/

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/22/1124252556/nyquil-chicken-cha...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fda-nyquil-chicken-warning_n_...

>Do many people in USA pop painkillers or paracetamol or aspirin daily?

Yes, it's very common, often around joint pain. Surely obesity and sedentary lifestyle play a role.

60 million Americans take Acetaminophen (paracetamol) on a weekly basis.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441917/

Interesting. How long does one of those bottles last for you?

---

In Australia, the regulating body for that stuff announced new limits back in 2023. They'll apply from Feb 2025 onwards:

https://www.tga.gov.au/news/media-releases/tga-makes-final-d...

* reduce the maximum size of packs available for general sale (e.g. supermarkets and convenience stores) from 20 to 16 tablets or capsules

* reduce the maximum size of packs available in pharmacies without the supervision of a pharmacist (i.e. ‘Pharmacy Only’ packs) from 100 to 50 tablets or capsules

* make other pack sizes of up to 100 tablets or capsules available only under the supervision of a pharmacist (‘Pharmacist Only’ medicines).

Those limits don't seem all that different from the existing pack sizes commonly on shelves though. So there's very likely some existing limits around pack sizes already.

At Walmart I bought a bottle of 500 Aspirin and I've had it for over 10 years it may even be 15 years. I looked just now and see there are two pills left. I thought I was using too much at that rate.

Here in UK the limit is two packs per person, and packs are usually 8 or 16 tablets(annoyingly the law is about packs not tablets, so you can't buy 4 packs of 8 tablets even though it's the same as buying 2 packs of 16). Tbf if you do need more you can always buy more from pharmacy in almost unlimited amount, you just have to ask for it at the counter(and I guess the pharmacist might not sell it to you if it's "suspicious" whatever that means).

Don't want to judge but that's concerning. You can really mess up your internal organs with that much volume (even spread over a year with a family of four).

You're allowed to purchase 2 packs of any drug containing paracetamol. Normally a pack contains either 12 or 24 tablets I think. Here's a link to a supermarket's policy: https://help.sainsburys.co.uk/help/products/phc-sale-analges...

Not sure about the UK, but in Europe typically pills are sold as blister packs. I don't think there's a limit per se, you can still buy a box of 50 at least.

> Countries where pack size restrictions had not been introduced were predominantly Eastern European [Slovakia, Lithuania, Croatia, Czech Republic, Poland (Lodz) and the Russia Federation (Moscow)].

https://doi.org/10.1111/bcpt.12959

The simple answer is the store managers don't care that much and it costs money to have the carts fixed.

Stores like Target buy nice carts and they last longer, stores like Menard's buy even cheaper carts (they might even make their own, they build their own electric scooters for in-store use).

I worked at a company in an adjacent business, most store chains either have their own service techs, or outsource it to a service company. These guys repair anything with wheels, from shopping carts to bakery carts to those hand carts and jack lifts. But there's only so much budget to go around and the carts get replaced every couple years anyway, it's easier to just recycle them.

I very rarely encounter broken shopping carts. Maybe once in like 20-30 visits I encounter one with a wobbly front wheel that pulls.

Interesting, my experience is that almost all carts get the job done* but have a small amount of pull, usually insignificant enough that it can be compensated for by pushing out at one end of the handle. My recollection is probably biased but it seems pretty rare that I get a "perfect" cart. Might be down to the different stores having different carts and maintenance approaches.

*this one fact probably goes a long way towards explaining why they don't get fixed

FWIW, I also encounter those issues in Germany, where we have the coin deposit.

This article doesn't seem to actually answer the question well...

If you want to see the problem, watch carts being put in the cart storage pens and watch carts being returned from those pens to the store.

A very small percentage of the carts will end up in pens off kilter, then pushed in by the entire line of carts behind them. This bit of pressure can bend the wheel attachment. Now you say "this is only one or two carts", but in a busy store that cart can be cycles 5-10 times a day so this abuse adds up.

Then, watch the carts get returned to the front of the store. The handler pulls out a 40' long 'cart snake' that is unwieldly and heavy. You'll watch them drag the entire line sideways at points to get it in line with traveling the right direction and to line up with the return lines. Getting dragged sideways both wears flat spots in the wheels and it can bend the castors or pop the soft part of the wheel of its rim.

> Getting dragged sideways both wears flat spots in the wheels and it can bend the castors or pop the soft part of the wheel of its rim.

This may be an American problem. In the UK and many European countries, shopping carts ("trolleys") have castors on all four wheels; they will quite happily glide sideways. This makes them more maneuverable in the smaller stores, at the cost of being more difficult to control - more like the ship in Asteroids than a go-kart.

Ya a few places have these in the states, but as you say the control issues are problematic. The whole, an object in motion stays in motion tends to mean if you're pushing one of these heavy carts and try to turn it will rotate about its own axis rather than make a corner.

I have actually come to prefer the all-castoring design. It requires more skill, but less force and the acheivable performance is superior. To turn a cart with fixed wheels, you must apply torque to the push bar. As well as being too narrow to give good leverage, the cart is quite dynamically stable and so resists this torque, so you must slow down or tolerate a wide turning radius.

To turn a fully castored cart, you apply physics - all you have to do is orient the cart so that is pointed sideways, then push hard. The key is then to maintain the cart pointing 90 degrees to the direction of travel throughout the turn, so that you can oppose centripetal force merely by pushing - no torque required. When the turn is complete, simply stop pushing. The cart will at this point still be oriented sideways of course, but you can correct this easily at your leisure.

I am from Europe and we have storage pens with a roof (no idea if it's the same in the USA) and coin locks. Carts still rotate a lot over the day, but I know that blocked or off the ground wheels basically stopped being a problem once those pens with coin lock became a thing.

And yes, we don't usually have those 10m cart snakes, only if one pen overflows and workers take a huge chunk to relocate them.

The other part that affects things is the locking wheel to deter theft. All that does is make the person taking the cart drag it, flattening out that wheel.

Tragedy of the Commons and cost.

Shopping carts are significantly durable for their acquisition cost and must be a design buyers are satisficed by.

Target larger store shopping carts seem more rugged and smoother rolling than conventional all metal ones.

Boundary antitheft systems generally address the theft problem. Perhaps these can be extended with app to leave a deposit for disabled, elderly people, and others to temporarily borrow carts for community neighbors without transportation.

PS: In the 80's, it always annoyed me when my aunt would "borrow" a shopping cart and then keep it until going to the store next like it was her personal property.

They get broken enough to be annoying but never broken enough to replace.

Lots of things exist in an "annoyance equilibrium" like this.

Great insight.

Examples:

Leaky faucets; squeaky cabinet/door hinges; door thresholds that let water inside only when it's a huge storm with heavy winds and rain; cars that only start after several attempts; my blog host which requires several failed attempts before uploading an image; grocery stores (Kroger and Harris Teeter, for two) that have only a single checkout line manned by a person — often new or old and slow — so as to "encourage" customers to use the many self-checkout stations; credit card readers that require several attempts before acceptance; gas station pumps which increasingly require more personal information before allowing you to put the darn nozzle in your car; phone and tablet touchscreens covered with fingerprints and skin debris and dust etc. but still quite usable; eyeglasses with the same issues; clothing you know isn't fresh but that's still wearable if the alternative is doing the laundry; running out of coffee beans and using instant as opposed to taking the time and effort to buy fresh beans.

I'm sure others here have equally amusing exemplars....

I worked in several grocery stores when I was young, I was never aware of any procedures for wonky carts. If there aren’t systems in place to identify and fix problems, it’s no wonder the situation is what it is.

I had never heard of the conspiracy theory that it was done on purpose to slow people down. That doesn’t really pass the smell test. When I have a bad cart I want to leave as soon as possible to minimize my time with it. It also makes me view the store in a negative light. These are both bad things, and it seems pretty obvious that they would get damaged over time from abuse.

I've been impressed by the carts the few times I've shopped at WinCo. Their carts always seemed to be fantastic.

I've been extremely annoyed by Walmart carts. The carts themselves are usually fine once I get one separated from the rest. It's the separating them that is annoying.

When a cart has other carts nested into it from behind, that raises the back flap. The two straps on that flap that are used to strap in small children when they are riding can dangled down through the grill of the flap on the nested cart. The clip on the end is big enough that if it twists at all it can get jammed in that nested grill, and the carts are then stuck together.

If you don't realize that the strap is caught and just think the carts are pushed tight, pulling to loosen them wedges the strap clip in very tight. Then you need to reach under to lift the bottom flap to relieve some pressure, while trying to un-wedge the clip. It's awkward and although I've not yet done it it looks like it is possible you get get an annoying pinch if you let go of the flap at the wrong time.

Are those coin locks really to protect the carts from the elements, or because Aldi doesn’t want to pay someone to haul them back and forth.

The main purpose is to encourage users to return them to the correct place in the car park, rather than leaving them in an empty parking space or the roadway, where they are likely to end up colliding with cars.

Little bit of both? Also probably to prevent the temptation of theft. Even though the fee is nominal, it seems to be enough of a detractor?

I don't think "theft" is the correct wording. Rather "taking it with you and not returning."

If it really was about stealing (taking and intentionally keeping), the 1€ or free plastic coin you can get at the counter wouldn't deter you at all.

You can unlock the cart with standard european key tip like this https://image.made-in-china.com/202f0j00GpWUwrYJnBoN/Sn-Euro...

Most homeless and poor people know this trick. It really is just for general populace who are too gullible to know better.

> It really is just for general populace who are too gullible to know better

I know you didn't mean it this way but this is an incredibly funny way of putting it. "The globalists don't want you to know this, but the shopping carts at Publix are free..."

Ill word it like this next time :p

There are also "shopping cart tokens" which you can put on your keychain, and as they are large enough to unlock the cart, but small enough to not get stuck, they can be directly pulled out, and you don't risk to break your key.

I live in the middle of a very large American city.

I never encounter broken shopping carts. It's just not a Thing, at least in Houston.

Interesting, I didn't realize the coin locks were only a European thing.

Aldi in the USA also does the coin lock. I don't know why other stores don't do it. Maybe because Aldi is seen as the cheap store and they don't want to be associated with being cheap.

Aldi is a European chain of course, and I suspect they carried that tradition over to their US stores.

I dislike this system. I don't go to Aldi very often, and I never have change on my person or in the car. So I grab a cardboard box (which Aldi makes available to customers) and fill that up as I walk around the store.

So I buy less than I would if I had a cart.

And hey y'all, it's not nearly as "oppressive" as you might be imagining.

It's been 20 years but I still miss the all-wheel steering of my grocery in Japan (jasco). Every cart now feels broken without it, even Costco's.

European carts are like that, but I dislike them.

Four wheel steering solves a very nasty problem for Japan and Europe - need to turn on tight corners. Expensive real estate -> narrow aisles -> no room to maneuver the cart.

Win for four wheel steering.

The problem, however, is that the fixed rears anchor the cart. They help the cart to take a straight line. The greater steering effort is more than offset by not having to constantly juggle a cart trying to spin on itself. So if you have wide, long aisles like in the US two wheel steering is a lot less effort.

Pro tip - if your cart is very heavy, and there is a tight corner, steer it from the end opposite the handles. It'll literally turn on itself with very little effort

Like, why do I always get in the slow line?

Because, there are many lines and the chance you get in the fast line is like 1-in-N where N is the number of lines.

This is why I was impressed that Tucker Carlson was impressed about the coin in the shopping cart. I've been to the US a bunch of times (a decade ago), and if memory serves well Walmart didn't have coins on their carts. In Europe though this mechanism exists in majority of the super markets (so I'm not surprised Russian super markets are also doing the same).

This is probably partly because a 1/2 EUR coin is still worth something (= can be used to buy numerous supermarket products), while a single US quarter is close to worthless. What item in a US supermarket costs under $0.25 these days?

In the USA Aldi has them but I don't know of any others that do.

I don't use shopping carts because my groceries typically fit in a shopping basket.

What I find frustrating about my local grocery store is when they inexplicably rearrange items. One week, bread is stocked in one aisle. Suddenly, on my next trip to the store, the same brand of bread has moved two aisles over.

Part of the reason why I switched to having groceries delivered.

A year or two ago my grocery store got rid of hand baskets. Now you can only choose between a short cart, a full cart, or holding everything in your arms.

I hate it. They’re not bringing them back, I’ve asked.

That's nasty. If I expect my goods to fit into a hand basket, I grab one. Better maneuverability in a crowd.

Did they get rid of free plastic bags at checkout earlier?

I ask because some Walmarts got rid of hand baskets. When they stopped providing free plastic bags at checkout there was a big rise in people carrying their purchases out in the hand baskets and then not returning the baskets. Those stores often decided to stop replacing the baskets.

I would not be surprised if the same thing happened at other stores.

No nothing else changed. I suspect the idea is if you have a cart of some size they expect you’ll buy more because you can fit it or it looks emptier.

Some kind of psychological thing.

Tesco stores in Slovakia have the anti-theft alarm thingies on hand baskets and you can't leave the store without tripping the alarm... There are multiple solutions to every problem.

I wonder if it's based on demographics? Here in Waxahachie, TX, there are no hand baskets at all, however speaking to people with a similar background to me in other states where they are a larger part of the population, and hand baskets can be easily found everywhere.

They do it so you have to explore and buy the high margin items, not bread.

Wow, that sounds extremely annoying. Stuff sometimes gets rearranged here sometimes as well, but it’s more like 1-2 times a year. Or even less.

I recall an episode of some sitcom where the protagonist has had enough and builds some insane super shopping cart.

Could it be trailer park boys?

I think it may have been Married With Children.

This used to be the case. Always a bent wheel or something. I was just reflecting recently that this was no longer the case, and has not been for years.

People learned what broke (front wheel that were slammed into things) and redesigned/reinforced appropriately.

I have literally NEVER seen anyone do preventative maintenance or repair on a shopping cart. All I ever see are attendants collecting them from around the store and parking lot, stacking them, and pushing them back to their holding pen.

It’s like pigeon nests - you never see them but they happen.

Usually it’s a cart maintenance company that comes in the middle of the night when the store is closed. Only time I’ve ever seen one is at a 24-hour store.

>To combat this, grocery retailers in Europe, such as Aldi, Tesco and Lidl, have coin locks

Where I lived, decades ago one store tried this. They ended up folding because no one wanted to deal with inserting coins, why:

1. What if you had no coins ? Most people in the US dump all coins in a big jar when the get home. I would guess back then, about 30% of the people never carried coins, so the chain instantly lost some market share. Now it is more like 90%.

2. These days, just about everyone under 35 do not carry cash, never mind coins. Back then, this was not too much an issue.

3. At the time, homeless people would cruse the parking log, breaking the device to get the coin. The store would have to replace the devices often.

FWIW, where I buy food, I would sat only 10% or less carriages have issues. Years ago it was much higher but I guess the chain does something different that other chains.

Points 1 and 2: you can get a plastic or metal store-branded token for free from a cashier. Or many of us carry our own token attached to your keychain. No coins needed.

Point 3: doesn’t make sense. The carts don’t have coins stored when they aren’t in use by a customer.

For # 3 -- Back the, some people would not bother returning the carriage to get their coin. They just left them where their car was and moved on.

You saw this was decades ago :)

For the plastic tokens, almost no one in the US (at least were I live) would deal with these plastic tokens. I very much doubt that would be accepted.

Also we have deposits on bottles, most people here just toss the in the trash, not bothering to return them. I am sure forcing carriage returns would lose the chain many customers.

For it to work, every single chain would have to adopt this at the same time. Not going to work where I am in the US.

> Also we have deposits on bottles, most people here just toss the in the trash, not bothering to return them.

It doesn't mean the system can't work. It means the deposit is way too low.

The system does work, if you count the homeless people who would take bottles out of trash and return them, treating it as a steady income source. At least that's how it used to work in my country. Homeless people were recycling even before recycling became cool :)

Re: Point 3 that would be cart left with a coin by a careless customer who didn't bother bringing back the cart to have their coin back.

Even better, sometimes homeless people will simply approach a person who just finished packing their groceries to their car trunk and ask "do you want me to put your cart away?" Of course they will do that only if they can keep the coin :)

I don’t understand how coin locks keep the carts better maintained.

With coin locks, customers are still “pulling carts through bumpy parking lots, wrestling them across the threshold of doorways in and out of the store, and forcing them up and down the curb.”

The only difference maybe is they are all being returned to a covered cart shed that is protected from the elements.

Then why blame the customer with all that stuff above?

In Estonia you can just pick up a little plastic tag that fits in the coin slot from the store infodesk, it's actually really simple.

What happens if you don't return it?

You use it next time you come to store.

I understood the point of the carts like this to be to encourage people to return them to the proper place in order to get their coins back.

Does it still serve this purpose when they give you a token like this, or, just have they like ended up with carts with this mechanism they don't really want and would be happy enough with carts without it too? I'm not following the point of it.

You take it back to cart storage if you need the money back to switch for money. If you don't take it out, the store worker will do it when closing the store.

I just hold on to one in case I need it in my wallet.

still works because it is easier to return the cart and take the token with you for your next shopping trip than it is to get a new token every time you go shopping. Additionally it probably also to do with the culture in some part

Aldi does the quarter thing in the U.S. and I’ve never seen it as a problem. Just always keep a couple of quarters in the car (I rarely carry cash otherwise). I never see carts scattered around the parking lot there like I do at most other stores, despite it being only a quarter.

I mean Aldi stores across the US have this system and they seem to be expanding not folding, I'm not sure you can pin this store issues to that specific point.

Plus once it's a generalized system and all carts require coins, it's not like you have the choice anymore.

I think it’s a great system.

Reminds of a big festival I went to in Germany. Beers were 5 euro and came in a sturdy plastic mug. Bring the mug back and get a euro back. 5 mugs and a free beer. I’ve never seen a place so clean after such a large party.

And Aldi cashiers will lend you a quarter if you don't have one.

Fact is, shopping carts are not always broken.

My personal favorite is when they maximize user input only to throw it all away after user registration.

IKEA carts if you want to simulate driving over oil. Why are they made with all four wheels turning?

Because for some weird reason, IKEA doesn't cheap out on the trolleys. (As opposed to what's in them.)

Trolleys in the UK and most of Europe have all four wheels turning. Except for Costco which use the US-style ones.

I find it much more maneuverable, which is important in our smaller aisles. US-style ones would be a nightmare.

That being said, I think both Costco and Ikea should probably conform to local standards.

It's easier to maneuver, way easier to turn.

How do you guys do it? Without a fixed rear axis, it’s difficult to roll in a straight direction. You’re constantly fighting the pull of gravity. With American grocery carts, I can maneuver through a needle even in Costco, because it goes in the direction I point to.

My mind went to "eventual consistency"... time to switch off the internets

The percentage of shopping carts that are broken tells you about the character of the local population.

The article's byline credits Eva Rothenberg, whose LinkedIn lists her as living in New York City. There must be horrible people there.

Here in Waxahachie, TX, there are almost no broken shopping carts, and people help when there is a broken cart.

What an absolutely wild conculsion to draw from the article. What even is the impetus for it? Just your bog standard lib owning? Or do you genuinely believe that the shopping carts are in better shape in your neck of the woods because the people are what...? Of higher moral fiber? Not ...i dunno, maybe due to the presumably massively higher usage of the carts in the big apple? Or the harsher weather? Or literally dozens of other more plausible reasons?

NYC leaves trash on the streets all week and will let vagrants dominate and degrade their subway systems, parks, and sidewalks without any recourse. NYC just doesn't care about keeping things nice. There's urban environments with even harsher weather than NYC (ie Stockholm) and even denser (ie Tokyo) that are nicely kept. There's really no excuse for it. They just don't care.

People in New York City don't use shopping carts too often. Fewer people own cars and drive than in Waxahachie, and they tend to go shopping more frequently and buy less at one time. I doubt that this was a story based just on the author's own experience in NYC - we've all dealt with wonky shopping carts! Waxahachie looks nice, but you should visit NYC sometime. It's a cool city and I think you'd learn a lot about the people and be less likely to write them off as "horrible" if you visited.

I’ve never used a shopping cart in Manhattan.

True, but it also tells you about the budget of the stores in the area.

A significant factor is also whether the local areas uses salt on the roads or not.

There are at least N failure modes for shopping carts:

* shopping cart wheels not coplanar

* shopping cart wheel does not turn

* shopping cart left in parking lot during weather

* shopping cart removed from parking lot entirely

Oh man, I visited NYC recently and was shocked when I went into the local CVS and Walgreens in Williamsburg. Almost all shelves had plastic covers with locks on them, so you can't pick up anything by yourself. Coming from a relatively safe country in Europe and to see something like that, not a pleasant experience at all.

Horrible people is certainly one way of describing the population of an area with extreme income inequality.

What’s income have to do with how you treat a shopping cart? I’ve been to in places in Asia with very poor (poor compared to the poor people in the US) people and they treated their shopping carts better than wealthy people in the US.

There is better social cohesion and respect for other people's property. Now, there are some oddities in that if they find you lying on the street hurt, most will pass you by and kind of look at you quizzically, but they also do have good samaritans, just not as many. The reason is often people will suspect the person who stopped to help stopped out of guilt, not because they were just trying to help.

>What’s income have to do with how you treat a shopping cart? I’ve been to in places in Asia with very poor (poor compared to the poor people in the US) people and they treated their shopping carts better than wealthy people in the US.

Would you say the difference in income in the places in Asia that you're describing were on the same level as in Manhattan?

There are very poor parts of America where people take more care of shopping carts, there are very rich parts of America where people take more care of shopping carts. But a thing happens when you have a notable population of mentally ill homeless people living on the same streets that New York level wealthy citizens also use. The person I replied to is from Texas, where they round up inconvenient people and either bus them or fly them to other states - including New York. That's certainly one way to level out the income inequality in the region.

>There is better social cohesion and respect for other people's property. Now, there are some oddities in that if they find you lying on the street hurt, most will pass you by and kind of look at you quizzically, but they also do have good samaritans, just not as many.

On that note, comparing "places in Asia" to New York, you're going to also have to factor in the effects of (presumably) thousands of years of culture, vs barely four centuries in a rapidly developed melting pot of capitalism.

But this is a lot we're typing out in response to one person's weird conjecture. My point is that I think it's distasteful for someone from Texas to be giving a blanket statement that people from New York must be horrible people. If they spent any time in New York, with New Yorkers, I would hope they'd have a more informed view.

How much time did you spend watching poor asians push carts?

The carts at the discount supermarket always worked and they were not walked home, that’s for sure.

People there are admirably hard workers. They don’t beg. They’ll do all kinds of itinerant and odd jobs but they don’t panhandle.

There's a lot going on here.

how do they help?

> To combat this, grocery retailers in Europe, such as Aldi, Tesco and Lidl, have coin locks on their carts.

Thankfully I haven’t been to a Tesco in as long as I can remember where the trolleys have been coin locked.

Coin locks were made for a different era. When everything is contactless, there’s little reason to carry cash. If you aren’t paying for things in cash, you don’t have change you can use for a trolley either.

Odd, the large Tesco near me has no coin required for the trolleys. However, the Lidl and Sainsbury's do. I don't carry cash, but I keep a few pound coins in the car just in case.

At least with Sains', if you ask the security guard near the door he'll unlock one for you anyway :)

You can just keep a coin with you. You don’t need to be paying in cash to have a 1€ coin in your wallet. But as others said, it’s common to use a token instead of an actual coin.

People often use little plastic coins. Even though it's worthless piece of plastic they want it back and thus deliver the carts back as well.

You can unlock the cart with the tip of the sn european key. No coins needed.

Huh, I have to try this.

Even more if in your childhood memory it is engraved as something fun. As a child, and I believe others too, getting and returning the cart with the little coin your parent gives to you was cool.

My parents and me were living near a large supermarket in the very early 90s when coin carts were introduced. I spent the first afternoons with my little BMX bike at the parking lot, looking for carts where people, unused to the new system, forgot their coins. Or I simply offered to return the cart. If I remember correctly, in one afternoon I made somewhere around 25 DM. I invested the proceeds into LEGO pirate sets, of course.

Over here in the UK, pretty much every cart (trolley) has fully functioning wheels...

The only exception to that is wheels that auto-lock to stop you stealing the cart when they cross over the property line of the shop (and they then require manual unlocking).

I suspect US cart designs are just bad...

I'm not sure where you got that idea from.

The last three trollies I've used all had sticking wheels. Waitrose and Tesco. And many times before. And I regularly have the same problem in France.

But yes, auto locking wheels are universally worse.

My local shop is a Waitrose, and quite often I see 10/15 or so trolleys in the rack have handles that say ‘on loan from trolly services’ or something. I wonder if this is because some are out on repair.

And it's very rare to have to put a coin in a trolley as the article asserts. It's not 1999 any more.

Coins are still standard in Germany so! It is extremely rare to have a broken one around where I live.

The coins are useless. It's a people problem not a mechanical one. You can unlock the cart with the tip of the key like this https://image.made-in-china.com/202f0j00GpWUwrYJnBoN/Sn-Euro... (standard european).

And I frequently do because I HATE german supermarkets anyway!

What's wrong with German supermarkets? Coming from the UK, I generally prefer them.

The only thing that pisses me off is that Lidl and Aldi don't have baskets. In fact my local Lidl had an absurd short-lived policy that you aren't allowed in the shop unless you get a shopping cart! Thankfully they came to their senses. I just use my shopping bag as a basket.

I consider german food products in general to be tasteless (I am not saying they are low quality but it just does not fit my palate). Lidl / Kaufland is fine for veggies. Rewe good in general and I like Billa+ but that's more premium quality anyway.

Just in general not a fan of german food products.

I agree, I find food in German supermarkets pretty bland, there's just something so generic about it all.

That's very interesting, I love German food

Ever since the pandemic most coin locks are always unlocked - and people keep them that way.

In Sweden it is very common, and this is mostly a cash-less country. You can usually get these plastic coins to use as a substitute, and I don't think I've ever seen a broken trolley here

In the UK it really varies based on the area the supermarket is in.

There are two large Sainsbury's supermarkets near me - one is right next to a university and suffers from students taking the trolleys back to their student accommodation - these have a coin.

Then there's another in a more affluent suburb - no coin.

It's very common in my country, and I think it's actually a very good idea. What's wrong with putting coins in the carts/trolleys?

Someone, potentially a start-up, should develop an appnfor that! Just imagine how much customer data you could collect! Ideally with some in-store location tracking to improve customer surveill... ahh, I mean customer experience! And so good forbthe environment, because no coins!

Don't tempt them... ;-) Also, how do coins impact the environment? They're metal, not plastic!

Coins and the environment? Who cares! The environment sells, and the hygene, coins are dirty!

What do you think, a seed round valuation of 50 million for that idea should be ok? More? The addresable market is beyond HUGE!

You mean something that would unlock carts based on fingerprints? :)

> fingerprints

Pah. That's so 1800's. Modern times would be face* and retinal* scan, plus matching DNA* sample for good measure.

---

* With the expected Terms of Service stating they're allowed to do whatever the hell they want with the data.

Why not? I woupd focus on lonking it to everything you can get from your average users phone and other online accounts. Improved targeted advertising or something. Fingerprints are fine, too! whatever helps sell it!

Plus, since every cart is matched to a person, no more vandalism or theft!

So NFC reader! Even better. Unlock a cart with your smart watch!

Nah, too complex. Just use BLE with an app and this will unlock the cart. Very low friction and it does the cart <-> customer matching.

And make usage of carts mandatory ( door will not open.... )

Go on, go on! I feel we are on to something!

Could be! :)

But only one reserve I have: the carts have to be powered for connectiviy and the electric unlock mechanism. So they could be more expensive. But then let's add an ad screen ( E-Ink! ) on the front inside and have this solve the increase.

Let's put it in a pitch deck! The idea isn't any worse than those non-transparent video screen fridge doors for super markets!

Hold on,ehat if the carts' screen could look inside the frudges and display the content? Augmented reality like? We just to figure out a way to make it all AI powered or something!

Showing you what you got makes no money. Bombing you with dedicated ads for the 20-30 minutes while you're shopping... hell that sounds awfully brilliant!!

you guys rock :). Go make a startup or something...and I'll come with some money!

This whole thread turned into incredible brain storming, didn't it?

I am not asking a lot, but if someone rolls with it, please, please don't deploy it anywhere near me! :-)

Aside, this is why HN still is a a great place online!

Will the escreen show ads on what I should buy based on profiling? Otherwise I don't see the point, to be honest. :)

I wouldn’t say it’s very rare. Maybe 50% of supermarkets have coinless trolleys?

I guess that's a sarcastic comment. It's rare to have coin less trollies. Or may be it depends where you live and which stores you go to for shopping. Tesco, Asda have coin less trollies while Aldi, Iceland don't for example.

Maybe it's geographic? I can't remember the last time I couldn't use a trolley due to it needing a coin

Stores cheap out on more expensive and durable wheels. News at 11. I remember going to a boughie grocery store and being impressed by their Rolls Royce shopping carts. Or maybe formula1, hard to describe, great grip and mobility. Probably very expensive / extra. I do wish those wheeled basket carts with wagon handle were built better.

As non american, I can't relate to this article. Such a niche problem. All our cart's are with coins - can't remember when I got broken.

Same here. Carts are often even free but there is no visible broken cart issue worth talking about here.

The article is greatly exaggerating. It's been years since I've encountered a broken cart.

based on my anecdata, close to 100% of shopping carts have a faulty wheel that drags when I select it.

Why are rental cars often trashed?

round here it’s just homeless people destroying them

I'm sure I'm weird but I find pushing shopping carts around to be degrading and clumsy. If I must use a cart, I usually park it somewhere discreet and scramble around the store clasping items until my arms are overloaded and then I deposit them in the cart. This allows me to be nimble and dodge between sloths who are burdened shuffling around squealy carts from bin to bin.

It's a greasy, screechy trash bin-walker hybrid full of food.

Do they not have the hand held baskets there? In most other countries I have been too in Europe, Asia, Australia the supermarkets have both wheeled trolley and hand held baskets or even only baskets for smaller convenience type stores for those needing less items.

Yeah I’ll use those when they’re available.

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